"Brute! You brute! You beast!" Gloria exclaimed. "You haven't changed, have you? You haven't changed a bit. You're still the little Jew who sold rags and scrap metal in New York, from a sack on your back."

"And what about you? Do you remember Kishinev, and that little shop of your money-lender father's in the Jewish quarter? You weren't Gloria then, were you? Well? Havke! Havke!"

The person calling his wife by her Yiddish name, Havke, is David Golder, hero, or more correctly antihero, of Irene Nemirovsky's remarkable novel of the same name. First published in 1929 in Paris, and now in a brilliant new English translation by Sandra Smith, "David Golder" (Vintage, 2007) has sparked controversy in France, Britain and the United States — from Le Monde and the Times Literary Supplement to American Web sites that focus on Jewish issues — as to whether Nemirovsky, an author of Jewish origin, was or was not anti-Semitic.